A Shiver of Wonder

by Derick Bingham

  Jack and Warren had a governess, a little Presbyterian lady called Miss Annie Harper. One day, between teaching Jack maths and handwriting, she interposed with a talk that made a very deep impression upon him. He later wrote that the talk was the first thing he could remember that “brought the other world” to his mind “with any sense of reality.”1 So, Lizzie Endicott and Annie Harper can take the credit for introducing Jack to fairytales and to spiritual truths. Combined, they have a lot of glorious writing to answer for!

  Jack later stated that his childhood had another blessing, namely his brother, Warren. It seems that during Jack’s childhood there was not a lot of mixing with other children, so it was a blessing that the two brothers were also good friends. At Little Lea the brothers enjoyed quite a lot of attics, and in one of them Jack set up his “study.” Here he kept pen, ink, writing books, and a paint box; and it was here that he wrote his first stories of Animal-Land, stories containing mice, and rabbits in chain mail who rode out to kill cats. Warren shared Jack’s world and greatly admired his brother’s ability to write stories and draw pictures. Warren also created a play world of his own called India. A little cistern-room up in the roof of Little Lea actually became the model for the beginning of the adventures in Jack’s famous children’s book The Magician’s Nephew.

  Jack desperately missed Warren when, at ten years of age, he was sent to board at Wynyard School in Watford, Hertfordshire; but he appreciated his brother all the more when he returned in the school holidays and Jack was able to share with Warren his imaginary Animal-Land. Warren loved drawing trains and steamships, and soon an Animal-Land transport system was introduced, whereby Jack’s Animal-Land was linked geographically to Warren’s India by steam-ship routes. No doubt, Warren’s ships were inspired by the great shipyard nearby and the moan of ships’ horns on Belfast Lough. Jack even wrote a history of Animal-Land, covering centuries of time; Sir Peter Mouse was one of his great characters, as was King Boy, who reigned in the fourteenth century. Up there in the roof of Little Lea in their secret retreat, the Lewis boys had quite a kingdom.

  All through history many people have achieved enormously successful lives despite having a disability. Helen Keller, for example, when she was less than two years old contracted an illness that left her unable to see or hear. Family and friends suggested that she be institutionalised because of her “terrorising behaviour,” but her parents found a partially blind teacher called Ann Sullivan. After a month of very real struggle, one day outside at the water pump Helen finally grasped the concept of language. Helen Keller graduated from Radcliff College in June 1904, becoming the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. She went on to become a leading campaigner for civil rights, women’s suffrage, and world peace.

  We think also of someone like President Roosevelt who in spite of the infirmity of polio became one of the truly great Presidents of the United States. In twenty-first-century Britain, we could think of Stephen Hawking who at the age of twenty-one, discovered that he had Motor Neuron disease. Professor Hawking eventually required a wheelchair to get around and lost his ability to talk, but he has spent his life working on the laws that govern the universe and has developed many scientific theories, particularly regarding black holes and his theory that the universe has no boundary in imaginary time.

  As it turned out, Jack and Warren Lewis both had a physical defect that they inherited from their father: they had only one joint in their thumbs. The upper joint, though visible, could not bend. Jack simply couldn’t make anything with his hands; using scissors as he tried to cut cardboard drove him to tears many times. For a little boy with such imagination, the frustration must have been enormous. But it led him to his crock of gold; it made him turn instead to writing stories. He maintained that someone could do more with a castle in a story than with any cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table. All things that happen to us are not good—that’s for sure; but the Bible assures us that they work together for good to those who love God.2 The old Irish proverb is accurate: when God shuts a door, He opens a window.

  Jack’s father enthusiastically encouraged his writing abilities; but, of course, there were books everywhere at Little Lea. There were books on the landing, books in the cloakroom, books piled up in a bedroom, even books in the cistern attic. All of them were on hand for Jack to read. He plunged into the works of writers including John Milton, Mark Twain, E. Nesbit, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jonathan Swift, and Beatrix Potter. All this between the ages of six and nine!

  In the mornings, with Warren away in England, Jack’s mother taught him French and Latin. I wonder if he felt about Latin as many other Ulster children do:

  Latin is a dead language,

  Dead as dead could be;

  First it killed the Romans,

  And now it’s killing me!

  Mother and son grew closer and were often to be seen taking afternoon walks together. In the summer of 1907 Flora took her boys on holiday to France to improve their French. They went to a seaside village called Beneval, near Dieppe. On the way home they stopped in London, and Jack revelled in a visit to the Tower of London and London Zoo.

  As the year 1908 got going, one of the saddest of all Jack’s experiences was beginning to surface. His mother felt very unwell and was soon diagnosed with abdominal cancer. The mother he loved, the pale, blue-eyed mother, who had such a sunny disposition, was now faced with an operation at home.

  One night Jack was ill with a headache and toothache and became distressed because his mother did not come to him. There were lots of comings and goings all over the many-roomed house; doors kept opening and shutting. Several doctors were in his mother’s room. After what seemed like hours, his father came in tears to Jack’s room and conveyed to him the nature of his mother’s illness. She had cancer. Jack then set himself to pray for his mother’s recovery. He later confessed that he had approached God during that time as if He were a magician, without any sense of love, awe, or fear.

  After the operation at Little Lea on 15 February 1908, Flora recovered, and in May she was able to go with Jack to the seaside. Things began to look up; but heartbreakingly Flora was in bed again by June. It was back to fever and delirium and pain-killing morphia. Jack longed to cure his mother; just how deeply was movingly portrayed many years later when he wrote The Magician’s Nephew in Oxford. In the book Digory Kirk, at the peril of his own life, seeks and finds the Apple of Youth and gives it to his dying mother, who recovers. The sadness of 1908 at Little Lea would never be far away from Jack’s mind.

  On the night of 21 August, Albert Lewis spoke to his wife of the goodness of God. He recorded her response in one of his notebooks: “What have we done for Him?”3 She died at 6.30 on the morning of 23 August 1908.

  “What have we done for him?” It is a good question in any century. The motto of the City of Belfast is Pro Tanto Quid Retribuamus, which may be freely translated, “What return shall we make for so much?” It is said to be based on the words of Psalm 116:12: “What shall I render unto the Lord for all His benefits towards me?” Flora could never have dreamt that her little boy, to whom she had given love, kindness, and guidance, would become one of the greatest writers of children’s literature in the world and one of its most gifted Christian apologists. In those first ten years of his life, and particularly in those long, happy summers at Castlerock, Flora Lewis had given Jack one of the greatest gifts any mother could ever give: her time. From that gift came, amongst other things, Jack’s awesome sense of Northerness—from which the world got the land of Narnia.

  Do not think that I am exaggerating. Kathryn Ann Lindskoog, who knew Jack personally and whose life was changed and deepened through reading his works, tells the story of Jack’s last piece of writing for publication. It was an article entitled “We Have No Right to Happiness” for The Saturday Evening Post in the United States. It was about sex. Apparently, a friend named Nevill Coghill called and asked Lewis how he happened to be writing for such
a popular magazine. Jack explained that the editors thought he was full of paradoxical ideas, so they named a subject and paid him generously. The friend asked Lewis if he was busy inventing some paradoxes. “Not a bit of it,” he replied. “What I do is to recall, as well as I can, what my mother used to say on the subject, eke it out with a few similar thoughts of my own, and so produce what would have been strict orthodoxy in about 1900. And this seems to them outrageously paradoxical, avant-garde stuff.”4 His eked-out thoughts were, of course, marked with his own genius as a writer, as he argued in a devastating and at times witty fashion against immorality, and in favor of faithfulness within marriage. He warned that if the idea of unrestrained self-gratification took hold, it would sooner or later seep through our lives, and every impulse of every man would be his own law. Then our civilisation would die at its heart and be swept away. Ah, Flora and Jack were to be a formidable intellectual pair across the twentieth century! The mother who nurtured Jack with a cheerful and tranquil affection and undergirded him with intellectual stimulation, by God’s grace would achieve more than she could have envisaged.

  Jack’s great friend David Bleakley told me that Jack had once asked him which was worse: a child’s losing his mother at birth, or losing her at ten years of age. There is no doubt that Jack felt it was the latter. No wonder he likened his mother’s death to the sinking of Atlantis. It would still be some time before Jack discovered for himself that his mother’s God was no magician. Awesomely, he would learn that there is no God but God and that He can give us grace to will His will. Jack’s unbending thumb would hold a pen through which God would bring incalculable blessing.

  Chapter Three

  THE WACKFORD SQUEERS OF WATFORD

  BELFAST LOUGH IS A LARGE, open sea Lough located on the northeastern coast of the Province of Ulster. It is a curving, thirty-two-kilometer stretch of sheltered water nestling between the hills of County Antrim and County Down. These waters create a channel leading up to one of the busiest ports on the island of Ireland: Belfast Harbour. The mouth of the Lough is defined to the north by the lighthouse at Blackhead and to the south by the town of Groomsport and the Copeland Islands. The inner part of the Lough comprises areas of inter-tidal foreshore, mainly mud-flats, lagoons, and land, areas which are important feeding and roosting sites for significant numbers of wintering waders and wild fowl.

  Over winter the area regularly supports over twenty thousand individual waterfowl, including golden eye, red shank, tern, great crested grebe, cormorant, shelduck, black-tailed godwit, curlews, ringed plover, eider, lapwing, and the guillemots at Bangor. While the inner Lough comprises a series of mudflats and lagoons, the outer Lough is composed mainly of rocky shores and some small sandy bays.

  The ambience of the area is perhaps best caught in a little anonymous verse entitled The Blackbird of Belfast Lough. In a translation by Frank O’Connor, the verse reads thus:

  What little throat

  Has framed that note?

  What gold beak shot

  It far away?

  A blackbird on

  His leafy throne

  Tossed it alone

  Across the bay.

  Sometimes, when I stand by one of those little bays of the outer Lough listening to a blackbird’s song or a curlew’s call, or walk on the foreshore, I think of Jack Lewis. It is a fact that, apart from his many crossings to and from Belfast Harbour, Jack’s travels were for the most part only in his mind. But few minds can have travelled as far, and the Lough played an important emotional role in Jack’s life. During his lifetime, it was the exit and entrance point to his homeland, as he frequently boarded the steamship to the English ports of Fleetwood or Liverpool.

  An advertisement from the early 1900s for The Lancashire and Yorkshire and London and North Western Railway reads as follows:

  Most direct and expeditious route between England and North of Ireland via Fleetwood and Belfast

  The Royal Mail Train Twin Screw Steamships

  Duke of Clarence, Duke of Connaught,

  Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Lancaster, Duke of York.

  The advertisement informs the reader that sailings took place every evening with “Sundays and Casualties excepted.” Fares were Saloon 12s6d. Steerage 5s . . . children above three and under twelve years of age were half fare.

  According to the Fleetwood Boat advertisement, Jack was certainly still a child when he began to prepare for one of their sailings. He put on a broad, stiff, white collar called an Eton collar; a pair of loose-fitting breeches, known as knickerbockers, buttoned tightly just below the knee; and a thick, prickly suit of some heavy serge-type material. He wore stiff, heavy, new boots. Finally, he put on a bowler hat and set off with his father and brother in a four-wheeled carriage across the cobbled streets of Belfast for a very new chapter in his already eventful life.

  The widowed Albert Lewis did not find it easy to say goodbye to his two boys. In the year that he had lost his wife, he also lost his brother and his father, who lived with them at Little Lea. Albert boarded the ship and paced the deck for some time, and then, filled with deep emotion, he took leave of his sons. They were embarrassed and self-conscious at this display of feeling. Somewhat relieved to leave him, they turned to explore the ship as she slipped her moorings and sailed down Belfast Lough into what turned out to be a rough crossing. Warren was seasick, but Jack turned out to be a good sailor.

  Jack’s first impressions of England were not good. The following morning around six o’clock the boys boarded a train alongside the steamer at Fleetwood for London Euston. As the train steamed across Lancashire, Jack reacted with a feeling of hatred. Everything looked different from what he was accustomed to. Jack was always to be an Ulsterman abroad. He carried a deep sense of the Holywood and Castlereagh Hills, of Scrabo Hill and Strangford Lough, and of the small fields and stone walls of the County Down countryside. The flat landscape of Lancashire that he saw from the train did not appeal to him, and the strange accents all around him jarred. The sea was gone; even the haystacks were the wrong shape. In time he was to view England in a much better light, but first time round he hated the sight of the place! The feeling was no doubt reciprocated, as expressed in the words of this ditty:

  Oh Patsy, you’re a villain;

  Patsy, you’re a rogue.

  There’s nothing of you Irish

  Except your name and your brogue.

  Jack’s immediate misery was to be further compounded. Of all the boarding schools in England, Albert Lewis could not possibly have picked a worse one. And why did he choose a boarding school at all? George Sayer has explained: “Albert’s main motive was social, the desire for his sons to attain and preserve the status of gentlemen, to sound and look right, to talk without an accent, to wear the right sort of clothes, and to have good manners (that is, manners acceptable to older men of the same class).”1 When consulted, Albert’s Headmaster, W. T. Kirkpatrick, advised that Jack and Warren be sent to a good prep school in England, in the hope of a scholarship and entrance to an English public school. He recommended a school at Rhyl in North Wales, but Albert chose Wynyard School in Watford. It turned out to be a nightmare, a disaster. Jack called it a concentration camp and nicknamed it Belsen.

  When one reads Jack’s description of his experiences at Wynyard School, one cannot but think of Dotheboys Hall School in Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby. Long before he became a writer, Dickens had heard of the hideous treatment of unwanted children in certain schools in Yorkshire, and he researched his target for satire by visiting Yorkshire and interviewing people there. These included the one-eyed headmaster, whose fictional reincarnation was the cruel and ignorant Headmaster of Dotheboys Hall: the horrendous Wackford Squeers. Dickens’ descriptions of the school and of what went on there are unquestionably amongst the most vivid and memorable of all his writings. The descriptions of the torture inflicted on the mentally retarded Smike are some of fiction’s most powerful satire. The exploited children of Nicholas
Nickleby are middle-class children. The book is a powerful attack on cruelty, and the scenes at Dotheboys Hall are amongst Dickens’ most popular dramatic readings. One can imagine Dickens stirring an audience with the scene in which Nicholas is driven to distraction by Wackford Squeers’ cruelty. Squeers is about to publicly punish Smike for running away from the school:

  “Each boy keep his place,” said Squeers, administering his favourite blow to the desk, and regarding with gloomy satisfaction the universal start which it never failed to occasion. He had his gaze fastened on the luckless Smike, as he enquired, according to custom in such cases, whether he had anything to say for himself.

  “Nothing, I suppose?” says Squeers, with a diabolical grin. Smike glanced round, and his eye rested for an instant on Nicholas as if he expected him to intercede; but his look was riveted on his desk.

  “Have you anything to say?” demanded Squeers again: giving his right arm two or three flourishes to try its power and suppleness. “Stand a little out of the way, Mrs. Squeers, my dear; I’ve hardly got room enough.

  Mrs. Squeers, being out of breath with her exertions, complied. Squeers caught the boy firmly in his grip; one desperate cut had fallen on his body—he was wincing from the lash and uttering a scream of pain—it was raised again, and again about to fall—when Nicholas Nickleby, suddenly standing up, cried “Stop!” in a voice that made the rafters ring.

  “Who cried stop?” said Squeers, turning savagely round.

  “I,” said Nicholas, stepping forward. “This must not go on.”2